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Bright Lights, Big City: Dinner and a Show

March 14, 2014

One of the sailing blogs I like to read had a post a little while ago titled "Plan is a four letter word". Oh, isn't it. What sounds great after a rocky morning- how about an easy pizza dinner and then a short walk to see some "magic trees" and a sound and light show? Yeah, that sounded like a great idea to D and I but not to Sky and Fire, I guess.
We had hoped that having familiar food and eating it earlier than we had the night before would have helped with Fire's restaurant behavior but he was just as bad as the night before- and in some ways worse, since we'd been struggling with behavior all day. Fire has been randomly screaming for about a year now. He does it when he's happy, he does it when he's sad, he does it when he wants attention, and for some special reason, he loves to do it in restaurants. We did our best to distract him but in the end, we had to eat in turns because he just couldn't be in the restaurant.

D tried playing with him and that worked for a little bit

I tried teaching Sky to play tic-tac-toe

mmmm... caprese salad

meatballs

There's no picture of the pizza we ate because Fire had exploded by the time it arrived. It was yummy onion, goat cheese, and bacon pizza that got eaten faster than has probably ever been done in that restaurant.

After our lovely family dinner, we headed over to the Gardens by the Bay, where they've built large, artificial trees among the real ones. I told Sky they were "magic trees" because they light up at night time and she was pretty excited to see them. Unfortunately, we walked past the Children's Garden with it's splash pad and playground before we got to the magic trees, so for the next half hour, Sky whined and cried about not being able to play there. We promised her that we'd come back tomorrow but what finally distracted her, at least for a little bit, was going on the canopy walk built between two of the trees. She loved being so high up in the air.

After the canopy walk, we found ourselves a seat on the very sharp grass at the base of the trees and Fire proceeded to clear out half of it with his screams. The light show started shortly after sundown and it was amazing. The trees light up and sparkled in time with the music. D and I thought it was wonderful but it only held the kids for a few minutes- the played with the camera and wrestled for the rest of show.

Fire and Sky didn't take their eyes off that dinosaur until we were long past it

Us here shot, with the Singapore Flyer in the background

Magic Trees

A view of Singapore from the canopy walk

The green that Fire later cleared out for us

Playing before the show (see how much room we have to play in now!)

What a day. I know that a lot of it was on me- I had expectations of the day, of the park, of the kids, and of myself and everyone fell short. I've done this before so I know that the key is to either not have expectations or to expect things to go very badly so that you can be pleasantly surprised when they go well. The kids are also both struggling with being away from home and their normal routines and it's showing. While I know this is hard for them, and for D and I, I'm glad we're doing it- these kind of trips are half of the reason we live on Kwaj in the first place.

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